


It's Getting Hot in Here

by tuesday



Category: The Sims (Video Games)
Genre: Bad Cooking, Cooking, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-15 23:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13041480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: With the death of her elderly grandmother and her parents moved to a new neighborhood, practically a world away, Senna discovered something ominous, something terrible: she did not know how to cook.





	It's Getting Hot in Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [polkadot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/polkadot/gifts).



With the death of her elderly grandmother and her parents moved to a new neighborhood, practically a world away, Senna discovered something ominous, something terrible: she did not know how to cook. 

Oh, she'd tried to use her easy-bake oven as a child, but at the first burnt muffin, she'd decided to stick to her blocks and books. Besides, Grandma was a master chef, and Papa knew enough to be getting on with whenever she whisked Mama away to France to drink nectar and get into fistfights with mummies. (Mama did the nectar drinking; Grandma did both.) By the time Senna reached her teen years, she figured either she'd find someone to marry and move in with as an adult who could cook for her or that Grandma would take a Young Again potion and well outlive everyone. It wouldn't, Mama confided, be the first time; apparently Grandma was as much Mama's actual grandmother as Senna's, which is to say: so far up the family tree as to be indistinguishable.

With young adulthood, however, came the discovery that Grandma had plans to finally pass on. "It'll be nice to rest a while, and I've always wanted wanted to try haunting things." She gave the items of her inventory into Senna's care, as Mama asserted she had plenty of her own, and let her garden of death flowers go to seed. By the time Senna came back from college (immensely glad for the flowers after an unfortunate incident with a vending machine and another with a swarm of flies when visiting the wrong person's house party), Papa was up to scratch to cook for them all, but he and Mama made plans that precluded staying in Senna's childhood home to cook for her forever.

"You can come with us," Mama said.

"We'd love the company," Papa said.

"There is no way in hell I am going to a town filled with witches, zombies, and vampires," Senna said.

As her parents refused to change their minds about Moonlight Falls and go somewhere more reasonable, like that nice collection of islands with all the resorts off the south coast, Senna decided she'd stay. She meant to spend Grandma's sunset years picking up a cookbook to read in the public library or preparing autumn salad, but there always seemed to be something more important to do. Grandma wanted to play chess and tutor her in logic. Senna was finally old enough to be given access to the inventing bench and the town scrap piles. Grandma insisted Senna be trained in proper form for jogging, because, "Maybe someday you'll want to travel, and you're nowhere near fit enough to take on a mummy." Senna had all these photography collections she really wanted to fill. Even once she'd learned the meditative trance necessary to more efficient sleep, there just weren't enough hours in the day.

Worst of all, a few days after her death, Grandma had insisted her remains be taken to the public cemetery, with its proper ambiance and more traditional opportunities to scare the bejesus out of all their neighbors. ("Though if you move neighborhoods, take me with you. Unless you decide to join your parents after all, in which case, I'd rather not have the competition.") Senna wouldn't even have the hope that Grandma would get up in the night and decide to make some lobster thermidor after a few hours of possessing the television.

Senna was on her own.

—

Senna entered the library with good intentions—now was the opportunity to finally learn to cook, no matter how little she actually cared to—but the instant she stepped foot through the library doors, she was hit by the sudden aspiration to increase her list of books read by three. Zero was a much pleasanter digit to end on than seven. She could spend hours reading Cooking Vol. One and only add one book to her tally ... or she could read several fiction novels in that same time and still be home in time to make supper.

In her defense, the library had a copy of _Tomb Raiding for Toddlers: What to Know_. Considering she'd only made it seven pages in as a kid before her mom had confiscated it (and then lectured Grandma on appropriate souvenirs for children), it was impossible to resist finding out what was in the remaining four-hundred pages. Worst case scenario, she could have canned soup for the fifth day running.

Senna dropped onto one of the arm chairs, unlike those jerks who'd decide to read right in front of the computer—if for no other reason than because those spots were already taken—and found her place. "Do you _really_ need to manually disarm floor traps?" asked the text. It went on to answer: apparently not. Other options included soaking in dive wells before braving fire traps, pushing conveniently placed statues across floor traps to wreck them, and mastering martial arts and meditation in order to teleport past them. Could toddlers even swim, or were dive wells just a faster way for them to die? Oh, well, it was non-fiction, not a picture book. It wasn't like it was going to give the toddlers ideas.

Senna, on the other hand ...

—

"I'm not letting you resurrect me just for my lobster thermidor," Grandma said.

"That's absolutely not why—" Grandma looked unimpressed. "That's only _partly_ why. I'm going to Egypt, and I want company." Grandma had, after all, been right about Senna's odds at taking a mummy in a fistfight. Better to bring along someone who'd fought mummies for fun or at least had a fair chance at surviving when Senna threw them in the mummy's path as a distraction before she made her escape.

"Nope." Grandma slashed a misty hand through the air. "I've only just started to establish my ghostly reputation. Maybe in a few years, when sims and animals alike fear me and the wild horses stop thinking it's okay to beg me for carrots. Do I look like I have carrots?" Grandma ranted for a little bit about the lack of respect she got now that she was incorporeal. "Like that's ever stopped me! And another thing—"

When she finally wound down, she seemed much happier for having vented. "Anyway, if you're that hard up for company, do what I did at your age."

"Put up an ad for a roommate?"

"That would be far more sensible." Grandma's expression said she was surprised Senna thought Grandma had _ever_ been sensible. "No, I just trapped some poor schmuck in conversation outside my house until he agreed to marry me."

"That's—" Senna did not know what that was, except kind of horrifying.

Grandma laughed. "Poor thing pissed himself because I didn't think to invite him in to use the bathroom in between flirtatious jokes and getting to know him."

Make that extremely horrifying.

"Oh, don't look at me like that. We had a rather happy marriage. So many of you youngsters drift apart, with little in common, and you forget to talk to one another after that first blush of admiration and infatuation fades, until suddenly you're two strangers occupying the same bed and would prefer a divorce to having to share the blankets. Lord knows that happened to my last marriage," she muttered this last sentence almost to herself. In a louder, more cheerful voice, she continued, "But Gord and I stayed best friends from that first meeting right up until he tried fixing the dishwasher without mopping the puddle first." She gave a happy little sigh. "Ah, memories."

"I'll keep that in mind," Senna said, carefully noncommittal. 

"Don't forget to invite me to the wedding!" With that cheerful dismissal, Grandma hopped into a nearby gravestone. Apparently her new neighbors were pissing her off, and she'd decided to assert her dominance by levitating their homes and shaking them about.

Senna snapped a quick photo—she'd already filled the It's Haunted page in her photography journal, but 1,000 simoleons was 1,000 simoleons—before wandering to the street, pulling a Kenspa from her inventory, and heading for home. There were no convenient sims standing in front of the house, but Senna was better than that. Just because it worked for Grandma didn't make it a good idea. In fact, it being Grandma's idea made it almost definitely a bad one.

—

Senna waited a full ten minutes to see if anyone interesting would wander by, but the only people she saw were a) her neighbors greeting b) the pizza delivery man. She sighed and resigned herself to another night of cold soup in a can.

—

Senna stared, defeated, at the refrigerator. She was hungry. It was morning. There was plenty of time to cook. She _really_ wanted something warm for once, and she refused to live on pizza like everyone else in this neighborhood. It was time. Surely she'd improved from her muffin-burning past.

—

She hadn't.

If anything, she'd gotten worse.

—

On the plus side, Senna had proof that the fire alarm was working, and she'd never liked that stove, anyway. Who decided bright pink went with a rather lurid green? SimChar and her father, apparently. Now she'd have the excuse to buy a Tri-Forge. Ooo, or maybe a Festus 44. She'd heard those were self-cleaning _and_ fireproof!

The fire was spreading to the counters. As they were also victims of her father's love of rolling dice for color design, it was something of a mercy. It was too bad she couldn't access build mode and move his favorite couch to the kitchen for this. Still, just a few more minutes, and maybe it would take the cabinets, too.

As she danced around the kitchen, alternately worrying the fire would take the fridge, the only decent appliance, and cheering on its progress toward the last counter, the firefighters finally burst onto the scene. Everything went from uncomfortably warm, an unfortunate effect of flailing about in front of an inferno, to terribly, tremendously hot. Senna thought she might expire from it. She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the ashes in her hair and how she desperately needed a shower. She was dressed in sleep clothes, not gussied up and ready to impress. The house was a mess. She was a mess. 

Senna was not at all prepared to have a sudden understanding of Grandma trapping her first husband in conversation until he agreed to never leave. Forget the couch—she wanted build mode so she could delete all the doors. Even trapped under the bulky layers of a firefighting outfit, Senna could tell that the second firefighter in the door was the most attractive eye candy she'd ever seen.

"You're, uh, you're on fire," said the boring firefighter, first in and diverted from trying to save the stove. Her words were so much noise, unimportant in the face of Senna's meeting her future first wife.

Hot Firefighter turned to Senna, and she braced herself for their momentous first words. Hot Firefighter unleashed the full force of their extinguisher right in Senna's face.

It did not cool her ardor. Not one bit.

—

Boring Firefighter droned on about fire safety. The kitchen was mostly saved, including those awful rust-colored cabinets. Hot Firefighter had wandered out without an introduction. Senna was singed, and the kitchen was covered in soot. She still had no food, and now she had no stove to cook it upon.

This was perhaps the best day of Senna's life.


End file.
